Just Kids
by SoraGirl
Summary: .'We had just been kids…but despite what our parents might think, what the world might think, despite birthdays and age and everything else…we weren’t kids anymore.'After Rachel's death, Tobias reflects on all the Animorphs lost and what they lost it for.


**Disclaimer:**I would love to own animorphs...but I don't :(

**Author's Notes: **Growing up, I was an Animorphs addict. I loved the series and the characters, and I think reading them at such a young age really helped shape my ideas of right and wrong and good and evil. Looking back on the series, it struck me as terribly unfair that our Animorphs could make all the right decisions at such a young age and not get rewarded for it. So I wrote this fic ;) Also, (though this is NOT an alternate universe fic) I've been studying the idea of parallel universes and multiple realities in physics, and I really found them incredibly interesting, especially the idea that every decision we make creates another reality, so I thought that might be fun to explore. Anyway, I hope the story at least helps anyone else who believes those who do good things should have good things happen to them feel a little better :)

**Just Kids**

_For all the good guys still fighting out there (even the everyday ones) _

We were just kids.

The gravity of that statement seemed to slip past us every now and again, most likely because while we _had_ been kids, we weren't kids anymore. No--kids didn't live through what we lived through; kids didn't see what we had seen. We had just been kids…and despite what our parents might think, what the world might think, despite birthdays and age and everything else…we weren't kids anymore.

It's been no secret that we've always wondered "what if." Time and time again we were faced with the decision to keep going. Yeerk, Ellimist, Crayak…Marco, they had all asked us to turn back. We had _all_ wanted to turn back at one point or another. There was no shame in longing for the kind of simple childhood so many others took for granted. Everyone had tempted us to give up, but we had been brave, we had been strong, we had thought we could make a difference.

I saw my own friends die. Time and time again I'd thought I'd seen an end of the only people I had ever cared about. Yet somewhere, in the deepest crevice I had, hidden so far back that not even reality could touch it, I kept hope. Maybe it was the Andalite part of me…or the human part…or maybe even the child in me that had been shoved away and thoroughly forgotten. Whatever it was, despite all the years and years of horrible shit my life threw at me, somewhere deep, deep down, I believed that good would win out in the end.

Until Rachel died.

It didn't happen straight away. Even when the strongest person I had ever known was gone, hope held on just a little longer. I thought maybe this time would be like all the others, and Rachel would suddenly appear beside me, crack some joke, and I would be unable to stop myself from throwing my arms around her and kissing her as fiercely as I could, promising myself over and over that I would learn to appreciate what I had.

But like most things, hope can die from starvation. Rachel was really gone this time and so too was the hope that I had harbored for so long that the good guys would someday, somehow win.

Because we had just been kids, kids that could have turned around a hundred times and lived easy lives. We could have given up, used our powers for fun or wealth or a million things. But we didn't. We fought the good fight. We were good, we were brave, and what did the universe giveus in return? Death and defeat. In hope's place, I had hatred. I felt with a deep, hateful rage that we deserved something better: that Rachel deserved to live.

With Rachel gone, that rage was the last clinging bit of human left inside of me. Hawks don't feel cheated or outraged, and no matter how deep I hid in the life of a hawk, I could never escape the guilt, desperation, and fury that were so very human.

No, I wasn't hawk. Hawks had an instinct for survival, and the human in me refused to survive anymore. It wasn't the hawk in me that wanted to die; it was the human…which I guess is why I ended up in my human morph by the edge of the river that day.

I stared at my reflection. I honestly don't know how long it's been…a week, years? Hawks don't really understand the concept of keeping time. For all knew, 40 years could have passed, yet I looked into the face of the same little preteen that had stumbled into that construction site by the mall however long ago.

That's when it had struck me harder than ever, the horrifying revelation that we had just been kids. We were so _young_. How could anyone have expected us to take on that responsibility?

For I second, I was angry at Elfangor for ever giving us a power that made it impossible not to fight. Yet I knew back then, as hopeful, strong, and innocent as we had been, it wouldn't have mattered if he had given us nothing; we still would have fought. We still would have believed in justice.

No, it wasn't my father's fault. It was the world's fault. It was peace and goodness and harmony and hope and love and friendship's fault. How long? How long did we spend fighting for them, and they never _once_ raised a hand to help us? Couldn't they have warned us in the beginning that they were all just talk?

I'm not sure how long I stayed there, staring at an unfamiliar face of boy that never got to be as innocent as he looked. There was no rush, after all. Death and life were so closely intertwined for me now that I wasn't sure I would even know when one started and the other began. I only hoped that I would realize it when there was finally no more pain and rage.

I had tried for a long time to believe that there was some kind of heaven. Even after meeting beings like the Ellimist and the Crayak, who seemed to defy the very notion of god, I held on. Not vocally; not clearly even in my mind. It wasn't a belief but a conviction that was true for me simply because I _needed_ it to be true. It ran silent underneath all the rest of my thoughts, as if it was the very atoms of which my thoughts were made.

When Rachel died, I was forced to rip myself apart from the very foundation. I finally had to do what I had feared and think, _really_ think, if heaven could be real.

You have to know that if there was any way for me to have believed it, I would have. If there was any one possible explanation that would let me hope for just a _second_ that one day I'd be reunited with the person that was essentially my world, I would have grabbed onto it for dear life and never let it go. I _wanted_to believe.

I couldn't.

I had been through everything. I had lost my parents, been hated and abused as a child, got stuck as a hawk, was tortured and was nearly killed or killed-then-revived a half a dozen times. But I had kept fighting and for once, I had found something worth fighting for.

If there was a god that could see all that and still take Rachel away from me, still not give a hero's reward to five kids that gave up everything and got nothing….well, even if there was a god like that, he'd be one sick bastard anyway, the kind I doubt would be interested in any kind of heaven.

I knew what that meant. I knew that when I shoved myself under that water and closed my eyes that that would be it. No more flying, no more memories of friends, good or bad. No more pain. No more anything. Blackness. Game over.

Honestly, I couldn't fucking wait. And why would I? I hauled the big rock I had found over to the river and in one single motion threw it and myself into the ice cold water.

Minutes passed before I felt that all-too familiar burning in my throat and gasping of my lungs, but the cold was setting in too, numbing the horrible screaming aches that were my body trying to survive. I let it happen. I focused instead on the feeling of the current washing over my human body one last time. My mind unconsciously flashed to the ecstasy of rushing through the water as a dolphin.

_Yes!_ My body heaved, as if it had triumphed in catching my mind revealing a way out. My mind might have grinned knowingly. To morph dolphin, I'd have to morph hawk first and would be dead before I ever reached the shore.

There's no way to adequately describe the last moments. There's color. Color like you could never imagine: colors I can't explain, colors beyond any mix of the colors I used to know. There are memories, of course. Not just good or bad ones, but _all_ of them and each of them bittersweet. All those things you thought you had forgotten, that movie about bears you watched with your eyes half open in second grade, every breakfast you ever had, what you were thinking when you were laying in that crib the first night out of the hospital. Things that you knew you'd never have or even be able to think of again. And it all rushes at you at once so you're feeling, _living_ it, all over: every heartbreak and every hope. And as exciting as it may sound, it is the most horrible thing you'll ever have to go through, to feel it and lose it all again.

I think, no matter how sure you are about wanting to die, that very last breath when there's no thought, just feeling: _everyone_ wants to turn back. Of course, by then it's too late. And for me, as all the color, thought, and feeling stopped, the only thing that remained was a small echo of a wish that things had been different.

That should have been the end of my story. I hadn't expected or even wanted anything more. The absence of an afterwards was why I was doing it to begin with.

I can't describe what came next. I remember some teacher droning on one day, centuries ago, about how language was really just a bunch of symbols we used to try to share a common experience, to try to create a sense of shared understanding.

There is no understanding this. There are no words, no symbols. There is nothing and everything. There is knowing but no thinking. There is emptiness like you can't even fear but a completeness even your best dreams could never reach.

Then all at once, I knew. But more importantly, I suddenly knew in a way I could understand.

_There was something._

I don't know what else to call it. I can't tell you what word it best fits. I can't tell you if it's God or magic or aliens, if it's some sort of being or like a kind of force. I just knew; I know—it's _something_. Something that's everything. And it exists.

And when that last breath of air left my lungs, it seemed to merge straight into it and the rest of myself followed.

And I saw I wasn't the only me there was. An infinite number Tobias's lived and died all around me. I saw the second side of every decision I made. I saw myself die every time I had ended up just making it. I saw realities I couldn't follow the lines to. I saw the influence of every flap of every butterfly's wings. I saw--I _was--everything_.

I'm not sure how I found it or even how I could be aware of it in the midst of all those other things, like noticing a small bit of dirt under your nail while you were being fired at from all sides in the middle of the world's biggest war or the whole needle in a haystack deal. Except this was an infinite number of haystacks and the needle was really just an atom.

But regardless of _how_ I found it, it was there. That one tiny atom, that one tiny life, that somehow filled up all of me.

We had won the war, and it was just like how we had all secretly dreamed it would be. We were hailed as heroes, there were celebrations and hugs and statues and confetti and medals upon medals. I saw myself shaking the President's hand. The world thanked us. The _universe_ thanked us.

It was a whole lifetime of how things should have been. It wasn't perfect. There had been worries and fights and fears, but every close call turned out somehow okay. Every player had gotten what they deserved. Everything worked out for the best in the end.

I've heard if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters, probability guarantees one would end up with the complete works of Shakespeare. This life, amongst the infinite number of possibilities…this was my Shakespeare.

I was jealous for an instant that that hadn't been _my_ life. But immediately I knew with unreal clarity that that _was_my life. I knew I hadn't lived them, but each of those lives was in me too. And all the death and tears of a million other lives that now belonged to me seemed to vanish in the glow of that one, un-perfect perfect life, that sonnet amongst instruction manuals.

It was a life I shared with Rachel, and as I looked upon the line of lives that extended from our life together, I felt the kind of pull towards them only a parent can feel. Those children: Al, Mel, James….they were as much mine as that Tobias's and so were all the memories.

I was warm: warm in the glow of that life and the knowledge that my question had been answered. There was good, and it was powerful: more powerful than I was, than the Ellimist or the Crayak. It was right, and it had paid us back for all our good in that one, small bright life in a seemingly endless cosmos. Somewhere, Rachel had survived, like she should have survived, and 

we had been together, like we should have been together. I knew the Rachel that died, my Rachel, had seen this too—been part of this too—and hadn't been cold and alone in death, but warm, surrounded by the memories of a family we had made together.

I understood. For that life to exist, all these other lives had to too. It was a cosmic version of no rainbow without the rain. Rachel—she was my rainbow, my reward.

Whatever it was, I trusted it. I trusted that it would do the same thing for my friends that it did for me. They would understand and accept being sacrifices for their own greater good. In the end, the Animorphs would see that all they did—the years of secrecy, fighting, and sacrifice, hadn't been in vain. There was something, something greater and good, and we had given up everything to fight for it.

We had been just kids, but at least we'd die as heroes.

That thought filled me with warmness even as the tiny little lights faded away.

_Fin._


End file.
